The present invention relates to a radio communication method and apparatus that use N transmitters, an N-element transmitting/receiving antenna and N receivers and conduct N-channel space multiplexing through minimization of the cross correlation between N-channel transmission signals.
With the recent rapid widespread use of mobile communications, there is a growing demand for a radio communication scheme that achieves high frequency utilization efficiency. A common definition of the frequency utilization efficiency can be given by the ratio between the channel capacity and the magnitude of the spectral space used. The spectral space herein mentioned is the product of the frequency bandwidth used, the magnitude of the physical space occupied and the time consumed. The frequency utilization efficiency thus defined can be enhanced by (1) increasing the channel capacity, (2) reducing the frequency bandwidth, (3) decreasing the physical space, and (4) shortening the time of use.
For example, in a digital modulation system, the channel capacity per unit frequency can be increased by multilevel. An example of this scheme is the increase from 16 QAM (Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) to 250 QAM in microwave communications. An example of the reduction of the frequency bandwidth is an interleaved channel assignment in mobile communications. An example of the physical space reduction scheme is the implementation of a micro cell as in PHS (Personal Handyphone System). An example of time reduction scheme is the implementation of half rate speech coding in PDC (Personal Digital Cellular) through utilization of a fill rate speech coding technique.
As mentioned above, the frequency utilization efficiency is increased by the combined use of various radio transmission techniques. For example, in PDC, three or six speech channels are multiplexed in each sector of a three-sector cell by a combination of such techniques as frequency assignment by a sector scheme, high-efficiency speech coding and time division multiple access.
Further enhancement of the frequency utilization efficiency requires the use of a method that reduces the number of guard bands between carrier frequencies or uses the same frequency in plural channels in the same area. For example, in the CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) mobile communication, orthogonal spreading codes are used to identify each communication channel. The communication channels identified by the spreading codes are multiplexed at the same carrier frequency. If N carriers can be used in the same area through utilization of the conventional radio channel multiplexing techniques, the frequency utilization efficiency could be made N-fold as compared with the conventional radio communication methods that are allowed to use one carrier in the same area. In practice, however, the channel capacity is limited by interference between other channels due to degradation of the orthogonality between radio channels.